My Exclusive Interview with Newt Gingrich

So if you haven’t caught on yet, I’m a huge Newt Gingrich fan. What may have given it away is that there are at least three to four post aboot the former Speaker in this blog every week, but that’s more his fault than it is mine. He writes too damn much, forcing me to copy a portion of what he wrote here with my opinion of it more than I do anyone else. In this case it’s a recent interview he did with…okay, so it’s not my exclusive interview with him as much as it is Tufts University’s.

Everyone keeps drawing parallels between what’s going on politically this year and what went on in 1993, leading to the “Gingrich Revolution” and the Republicans taking control of both chambers of Congress. There are just two key elements missing in 2009: 1) no Newt Gingrich, 2) no Contract for America. We’ve got no one leading the way, and have nothing to campaign on as a party…even if Gingrich keeps dangling his work for American Solutions in front of us.

Here’s the man that should be President looking forward and looking back…

Well, in the immediate period [the Contract] was remarkably effective. First, it was very specific, much more so than the promises of the Obama campaign. We had 10 bills actually written so that the American people could see our plans. It was a very detailed project. When we won, we kept our word. We voted on all 10 bills in the first 93 days and passed nine of the 10 in the House. We lost the balanced budget amendment in the Senate by one vote but decided to balance the budget anyway. We then launched a project, which became the first four consecutive balanced budgets since the 1920s. In addition, as a political document it helped to create the first Republican majority in forty years. As a result of keeping our word, we became the first re-elected Republican majority in 68 years. So you would have to say that it was pretty effective.

Our [American Solutions] model is fundamentally different than the Obama model. We believe that in the end you need to have jobs created by small businesses and jobs created by competitive corporations. Raising taxes to hire more bureaucrats is not a road to economic growth, but a road to economic decay. We propose four major tax cuts. The first is a two-year, 50 percent reduction in the Social Security and Medicare tax, so that every American could have an increase in take-home pay. Second, if we want to compete with China, we favor matching the Chinese in capital gains tax at zero. If there were no capital gains tax in the United States, you would be astonished at how many new jobs and factories would be created. Third, if you want American companies to compete in the world market, we ought to match the Irish corporate tax rate at 12.5 percent. Right now, when you add federal and state corporate tax rates together, we are far and away the most expensive country in the world. You are asking [American] businesses to compete with a huge burden that their competitors do not carry. Fourth, we would abolish the death tax permanently because we believe as a moral cause people should be encouraged to work and save. Those four tax cuts would dramatically accelerate economic growth.

So who do we have to step as our Newt Gingrich for the new Millennium? I keep pushing for Rep. Paul Ryan from Wisconsin. He’s young, not from the south, is one of our most intelligent advocates of conservative domestic policy – or “kitchen table issues” if you will – and he even comes with his own Roadmap for America’s Future.